[Developing] Budget Vintage: Unpowered White Hatebears

Dumpster AC there are ways to fight those decks, don't give up hope. That being said a second color might be necessary for it to work out. You can do this budget style, (though it may require getting some scrubland or plateaus, they are amongst the cheapest duals, cheaper than many fo the lands in modern).

For beating mentor gush specifically I would strongly consider 1) jitte and 2) Sulfur Elemental. Both cards are very good and can turn the tide by themselves given a little time, which is all this deck is trying to do.

It is always an uphill battle to play hatebears in vintage, but the beauty of hate bears is that they can beat anything if tweaked correctly.

@garbageaggro I'd love to try and figure it out, but at the moment, I honestly don't think there's enough varied cards in White that can successfully nuke token-based strategies. The main issue being that Mentor runs white, and has access to Swords to Plowshares and can put me off plays while SIMULTANEOUSLY significantly adding to power/toughness on the board, which I generally don't want to block.

I've made some edits to the deck, and I'm getting happier with what's been happening.

I'm pretty certain that Spirit Guides are the way to go for this deck. Getting turn 1 plays is massive, and Spirit Guides allow me to retain the Stony Silence/Null Rod plan and still let me accel. The downside is that my hand gets emptied far quicker, and I don't have the ability to refill... at all.

Enlightened Tutor has been absolutely a game changer. If I make a good enough metagame call, I can plop a Tutor and search for the most effective strategy against the deck they're playing. A frighteningly large number of cards (for a creature deck) can be searched up. This is incentivizing adding in Thorns, although I'm not quite sure.

Tried Black Vise for a few days, and it made a huge difference in about a half of the matches I played. It kept people from using Library, and it hit at least two times in games where I played it. A few games were won off the back of that card alone. The issue is that it isn't a prison card and those slots needed to go somewhere else.

With the accel now available, I added 2x Eidolon of Rhetoric and kept one Ethersworn Canonist. Eidolon actually helps more against Mentor because Mentor gets triggered off of Moxen, which can still be spammed with a Canonist. Canonist is also a 2/2, and will likely get attacked into, whereas Eidolon is a 1/4 and that matters way more than it should...

SB: Windborn Muse needs more accel than I currently have to be effective, but Ghostly Prison got so much better after including Enlightened Tutors, as is Ratchet Bomb, Aegis of the Gods, and Suppression Field.

Added a metagame analysis section (Section 7) that should be updated most frequently with little blurbs as I play the deck. Not sure how to archive past analyses, but I want the most relevant information seen.

Just a note, Suppression Field has moved to a 1-of in the main, and Turn 1, it's one of the best cards in the deck, and it almost beats playing turn 1 Thalia. Against any strategy that involves Planeswalkers, Manlands, and Fetches, this card has the ability to heavily tax a player, down to you getting three to four free turns throughout the game, or more. Combine that with Null Rod/Stony Silence and a strategically laid Revoker, it's very difficult for people to bust through a turn 1 Suppression Field.

@Dumpsterac1d
When you mean it beats Thalia, you mean that it's effect is even better than thalia, right?

The closest creatures that I can think of are Leonine arbiter (not really comparable, but both affect fetchlands which is one of the best effects from suppression field playing tax deck). Revoker can shut activated abilities from target non-land permanent. Burning-Tree Shaman deals 1 damage whenever a player activates an ability that isn't a mana ability, but does not affect the ability to trigger them. Azorius Guildmage can counter activated abilities, but for a high 2U.

Null rod on legs could have been viable years ago, but creating now a bear for 2cc with rod text... that would be nasty, specially in white.

@xouman Yeah, it's effects can be a better choice than Thalia. Often I'll have a hand with a couple plains, a Spirit Guide, Thalia and Suppression Field, and the times where I've managed to get out a turn 1 Suppression Field I get way ahead. Players keep hands with fetches and one mox, and if that mox isn't a Sapphire, they're drawing from the top to find mana.

The thing that doesn't sit right is that it's not a bear and doesn't add p/t or a clock to the board. I'd use Arbiter but I've been having great success with Enlightened Tutor.

Haven't ever played enlightened tutor, but I have played vampiric and never got fond of it. Trinket (for example) is 2x1. Demonic 1x1. Vampiric/Enlightened 0x1. Whenever I have played "fair" decks, mulligans always hurted a lot, because there is no ancestral or gush to recover CA. Of course you play cards that lock lots of opponent cards (for example stony silence of sanctum prelate, but also field or thalia can do it temporary). I suspect that while there is some tempo card in play (thalia, or suppression field) ET can fetch for the right lock card, and that be game winner if you detect devastating cards against each pairing. But I suspect that often the ET would be misstepped (which is not that bad, being 1x1 but at 1 mana loss for you despite making the misstep alive, since it's otherwise dead). Even worse, the fetched card can be countered, losing cards and mana in the process.

@xouman You're totally right about Tutor getting misstepped, but there are a couple of strategies.

One is I run 4 missteps myself, so there's that, and two is that I'm running 3 Abolishers at the moment, so throwing one out on my turn is actually preferable about 1/3 of the time I draw it, which is almost never the case with the Visions tutors.